The girls on Pretty Little Liars have faced some terrifying foes over the years, but the second half of season seven has presented them with a challenge unlike any they've seen before: a seemingly sentient board game that's capable of producing knives and poisonous gas at will. According to PLL props master Chris Vail, Liar's Lament is the most elaborate prop ever produced for the show, requiring collaboration between the writers and many different design teams. "It was a little bit of a nail baiter," he says, adding that starting "well in advance" of the production deadline didn't prevent the game's construction from coming "right down to the wire." Here, Chris shares behind-the-scenes secrets of how the game was made and weighs in on the possibility of Liar's Lament becoming something you could play at home.

1. Liar’s Lament was initially conceived as a mash-up of Life, Jumanji, and augmented reality games like Pokémon Go. "The first sketch I got [from the writers], it looked a lot like a spider web," Chris explains. "They described it as the Game of Life meets that model in Beetlejuice of the town … [and later], there came a moment when one of the writers and I started talking about Jumanji. We all loved the idea of the internal, beautiful machine that could be inside this board. I went out to my truck, and I took a piece of poster board, and I drew up — you would laugh if you saw how crude of a drawing it was — an idea of this game. You would laugh again if you saw at a certain level how much it actually turned out to be like that crude drawing … They came back to me and said, ‘Hey, we really want an element of a phone involved in it,’ so I came up with the idea of the phone replacing the spinner on the board, and I started doing some research about augmented reality and how the phone could become both a part of the game board and also a separate piece of the game."

Mona inspecting the craftsmanship of Liar’s Lament.

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2. Only one copy of Liar’s Lament exists, and it’s now in the archives at Warner Bros. “There was only one final version, because it was so involved,” Chris explains. “From the very first nugget and sketching and all that, I think it took a couple of months [to finish building it].”

3. If you played the game in real life, you wouldn’t have to worry about knives or letters popping out at you. “It started off as a flat board that was just going to sit on a table, but then we started thinking about how cool it would be if it had a life of its own,” Chris says. “At first, it was just supposed to move the pieces around [itself], and then with each new episode came ‘and then it squirts nerve gas, and then a knife pops out, and then it shoots out an envelope.’ As each episode came out, it was like, ‘Oh, OK,’ and we created a way for it to do [what the writers wanted]. The knife, that’s a special-effects gentleman under a hollowed-out table making it pop out. Each one of those things was a special rig that was created, that was operated by a person, like for the little envelope shooting out — there was a little push device that was created just for that.”

Hanna fails to complete the game’s mission.

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4. Liar’s Lament is “without question” the most elaborate prop ever made for PLL. Chris has worked on a lot “fun” PLL props over the years but says this one was “absolutely” the hardest one to execute, even with all the times the writers needed dolls that looked like the Liars. He specifically cites “the magic box that pops open and there’s a saw inside” and “the life-size Hanna doll where we peel off her face and there’s a face underneath it,” as examples of the most “fun and challenging” props, “but this one for sure was the longest and the most difficult.”

5. A lot of departments worked together to build it. “It was a huge group effort,” Chris says. “The design of it was our graphic artist, and I hired another artist who did portions of it. The design studio here at Warner Bros. took the material and hollowed out the back of it, and did special routing … so that the little jail cell could pop up. So we could route all the lights underneath it, the electric department put LEDs all around. I had another artist who built those little houses and things. The cabinet shop here made the actual base of the thing and we routed in the little pattern on the side. The special effects shop here created the little door with the slot that had an open-close mechanism on it.”

6. A special sculptor was hired to produce the tiny game-piece replicas of the Liars. “Doing the girls’ little figures at that scale, I learned an immense amount,” Chris says. “There was a time when I was going to have their whole bodies scanned, and 3-D-print [the figures]. It didn’t seem like we were going to be able to get a high-res-enough print of them to really make it look just like them, so I hired a sculptor who sculpts at a tiny [scale]. That scale is so small and those were all hand-sculpted.”

The Liars meet their new nemesis.

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7. The one thing missing is more of Rosewood. If Chris and his team had more time to make Liar’s Lament, he says the first thing they would have done is added more detail to the replica of the Liars’ hometown. “You always want to do more,” he says. “I think [the models] turned out great, but given more time, more money, all of the things that we always wish we had, I would have liked to have fleshed out the build of the town a little bit more, to have built a Radley building.”

8. With a little time and effort, Liar’s Lament could become a playable game. Chris says it would be “prohibitively expensive” to make a game that could pop knives out at you but it would be possible to modify it for home use with a little creativity. “I was fascinated with the idea of an electronic device at the center of an old-school game,” Chris says. “I wish we had done [the game] earlier in the show, where maybe that would have been a possibility that someone wanted to turn it into a real game. It would have been fun to try to work it out into a logical game that people could play.”

For more on Liar's Lament, watch this ~exclusive~ PLL featurette, in which showrunner I. Marlene King and cast members like Troian Bellisario and Tyler Blackburn share their thoughts on the game. Janel Parrish, who plays Mona, describes it as "a board game from hell," and Sasha Pieterse, who plays Ali, says the detail was "incredible." "It’s kind of a new level I think for A," Sasha says. "It just keeps getting more and more serious, more and more dangerous." Start placing your bets on what will come out of that board next!

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